Page 38 of The Brightest Fell

“Not all,” she said. “Most, though. Not too much left for me. If you said ‘Poppy, make yourself to look like a human-kind,’ I couldn’t do it.”

“What about your natural magic?” asked Quentin. Pixies normally have a sort of passive “you can’t see me” field that keeps them from being noticed by mortals. It’s handy. Sometimes I wish I had one.

Poppy shook her head. “Not that neither, which is why we don’t do it for much anymore. Used to be, someone kicked our mushrooms and squished our children, we’d small them right down for a while, maybe let a cat bat them about. Teach them a lesson and send them back to their parents not believing. Ha! But now, looking like we do . . .” She indicated herself, glowing skin, wings, and all. “If I smalled somebody down out in Human, I’d get found straightaway, and taken for a freak, or arrested by the wingless for endangering us all. I can’t hide myself from human eyes when I’m the same size as they are.”

“Hopefully, it doesn’t come to that,” I said. “This is a very big favor, Poppy. I won’t forget it.”

“’Course you won’t, because I’m coming with you,” she said blithely. She laughed at my blank look. “You don’t think I’d be letting you walk off with all my magic, do you? I’ll want it back as soon as he’s awake, no mistake of that. But this is an adventure, and we don’t have so many of those.”

“Right,” I said faintly. Because a human-sized pixie in need of shoes was exactly what this quest needed.

There was no sense in arguing with her, and she was right about one thing: it was unreasonable to expect her to let us walk off with her magic. But if Simon was his usual size, there was no way we’d be able to transport him.

Sighing to myself, I walked over to where he was lying in the dirt and picked him up as gingerly as I could, all too aware of the size difference between us and how fragile his body was in comparison to mine. If I accidentally crushed his rib cage he wouldn’t recover; he’d just die.

“You want as for me to carry him?” asked Poppy blithely. I turned to blink at her. She offered me an understanding smile. “We don’t big ourselves up too often, because it’s hard and it hurts and we need to small somebody down to do it, but I know what it feels to have somebody lots bigger carrying you. I know how to hold.”

“That would be great,” I said, and let Simon’s body slide into her waiting hands. She made him vanish into the bodice of her dress—where, I realized, pockets had been stitched to almost every seam. It made sense. Pixies are scavengers, taking whatever they could get their hands on. Of course they would need as many pockets as they could fit into their clothes.

We had wasted enough time. I stepped away from Poppy and closed my eyes, trying to filter through the myriad scents surrounding me until I found the campfire smoke and climbing roses trail of August’s magic.

The fact that it was still there for me to find said something about how long the pixies had been alone here. Under normal circumstances, all traces of August would have long since been buried under the magical trails of a hundred other spells, a hundred other passing fae. But pixie magic is different. It manifests as sparkling, scentless dust, and it hadn’t obscured her passage.

I opened my eyes. “This way,” I said, and started walking.

Behind me, I heard Poppy ask, “We just follow?”

“We just follow,” confirmed Quentin.

They did.

The ground grew marshier under our feet, until we were picking our way around the edges of a swamp, surrounded by trees that looked something like mangroves, and something like magnolias, and something like nightmares given vine-encrusted branches and leaves that blocked the sky. Sometimes those vines seemed to slither, implying the presence of snakes. I hurried on, not looking around more than I absolutely had to. If something attacked us, then I would care about it. If not, we could live and let live.

There was a path in the mud if I watched for it carefully. It bent and twisted, all but tying itself in knots, and August’s scent was all along it. She had come this way. So long ago that time had smoothed her footprints from the mud, but still—my sister had walked here, and now I was following her. Something about it seemed inevitable, almost, like life was always going to bring me to this point eventually.

A grassy mound rose out of the swamp ahead of us. Turtles in impossible colors, crystal blue and pine green and daisy white, basked on the shallow sides. They didn’t slide away at our approach, only looked at us with slow, curious eyes.

The mound had a door, rough-hewn, sunk into the earth alongside a circular window holding panes of thick, bubbly glass. I looked back. Quentin shrugged. Poppy, busy goggling at the strange turtles, said nothing.

“Right,” I said, and raised my hand, and knocked.

The door opened.

The woman on the other side looked barely old enough to deserve the title: she was sixteen at best, with the ghosts of old acne scars still haunting her cheeks, and long, dark hair that fell over her shoulder in a profusion of semicombed curls. She was wearing a blue tank top and jeans, and she looked wearily unsurprised to see me standing on her doorstep.

“All right, you found the back door,” said the Luidaeg. “I suppose you might as well come in.”

TWELVE

“LUIDAEG.” QUENTIN PUSHED past me and threw his arms around the sea witch, first among Firstborn, monster under the collective bed of Faerie, in a way that would have been suicidal coming from virtually anyone else. From him, it was nothing more than a genuine expression of relief at seeing a friendly face. “You’re here.”

“You found the back door,” she said again, ruffling his hair. Her hand came away faintly glittery. She looked at it, then at Poppy, who was doing her best to disappear behind me.

It might have been easier if Poppy hadn’t still been lit up like a Christmas tree. The normal pixie glow is reasonably bright. On a pixie the size of a human being, it was virtually blinding.

“Toby, why is Quentin covered in pixie dust, and why is there a giant pixie behind you?” Somehow the Luidaeg made that question sound almost reasonable. She has a gift for that sort of thing.

“We met the local pixie colony,” I said. “They knocked us out. Didn’t you invite us in?”